


Sight and Sound

by Harukami



Category: DRAMAtical Murder
Genre: Gen, M/M, just a family fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-21
Updated: 2014-01-21
Packaged: 2018-01-09 12:15:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1145878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harukami/pseuds/Harukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As long as he gives them something they want, he will receive something he wants. It's a basic and logical thing.</p><p>But the world isn't such an unkind place.</p><p>A little story about Noiz and his brother.  Thank you tumblr user Wrenchdolt for the seed of this idea!<br/>ETA: updated Dec 30 2014, now that Noiz's brother has a name (and Noiz does too)! (For the curious, the name I previously gave Noiz's brother in this was Vize haha.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sight and Sound

Eventually, he gives up.

Nobody comes when he throws himself against the door again and again. He peels his fingernails back on the door and gets nowhere. He pounds instead, endlessly, because he feels no pain and so he can keep pounding long past his voice has worn into a whisper in a throat that can't feel it. But when he hears his fingers crack, he fears for his life for the first time. If he keeps this up, if he keeps throwing himself at the door heedless of what happens to him, he will die. He cannot feel how much damage he has done to himself, and he will not be able to tell how quickly or slowly it will heal. If they are heedless of the damage he does himself as well, then he will die.

He thinks about dying.

There's nothing to do in there, so of course he thinks about dying. There is nothing to occupy his time except a desire for release. If he can't be released from this room perhaps he can be released from his life. It's not a thought he particularly reaches for, but it lingers at the edges of his mind at all time. The room is designed so that he can survive here. He can eat, and stay warm, and drink, and pass waste, and sleep, but there is nothing else except survival. His mind aches. He could die. But they'd win then. It'd be like they wanted: he would stop existing. So he'd live.

If he is good -- some quality of good that he cannot comprehend, since there is no ability to be 'bad' here -- they will not keep him here forever. It's impossible. That thought, between the pulsing spite inside him, keeps him alive. Eventually his parents will die, too, and he will be released. He needs to outlast them. He needs to outlast it all. If there is nothing anyone will do for him, then all he can do is keep himself sane until he is free. 

He scratches himself when the silence and nothingness gets too extreme. He cannot feel it but he can see the marks it leaves behind. _I am alive. I am alive. I am alive._ It is a half-reasoning. When people would try to comfort the other kids, they would tell them many things. And sometimes, it would be: Pain is the proof that you are alive. But even when he leaves gouges, all he feels is pressure and a faint looseness. There is no proof that he is alive at all. But if he is bleeding, there must be pain. He simply cannot feel it. He bites his tongue instead and feels a sharp ache. His tongue keeps him alive. When there is nothing else, his tongue keeps him alive. 

He is fairly sure that only the servants go near the door. His brother must be forbidden, and his parents have no desire to. They approach, slide a tray through the flat, narrow slot. Take trays away that he pushes back through. He waits for his food, one day when the silence has worn down his pride, and pushes the slot open.

"I wish to learn," he says through it. "Please give me something to learn."

It is annoying to rely on anyone even for this. But there is nothing here. Schooling sounds wholesome. Sounds 'good'. If he can learn in here, then is is occupied, and he is doing what they want, and if he does what they want they will be good to him. It is an exchange, he thinks. His behavior is money to them. He will pay them in being a quiet and obedient son in his cage, and receive from them goods and services.

As long as he gives them something they want, he will receive something he wants. It's a basic and logical thing.

It works, and he clings to that idea with the same tightness that he clings to the thin computer that is slid through the slot the next day. People have power. You cannot get what you want through nothing. If they get what they want, they will hand over things you want. If you can understand what they want, then you have power.

It has been a while since he has handled a computer, but he was quite good with them in school, and stares at his fingers in incomprehension when they do not sit right on the keyboard. He pulls his pinky and his ring finger straight manually, tries to sit them on the keys, watches them curl back under again.

There is no help for it. Every key he strikes will teach him to type around their broken curve. So it's fine. He will compensate. 

The first thing he does, after opening up a variety of pages to read, is disable the keylogger. A trick he learned from an older child at school, when he'd been allowed to talk to others. Let them think he is spending an extensive time reading. It isn't that he won't read them later. But he wants not to be spied on. It doesn't matter what he's doing; it's just that it's none of their business.

A chat window pops up. _**2020:** Mother and father told me you got a computer._

It's clear enough who it is from that. Theo. Theo, who always took his side. Theo, who hasn't been by his door. He will not reach out the first hand to his brother. But he replies, _Yeah._

_**2020:** I'm glad to talk to you._

_Is that so._

_**2020:** Are you okay?_

He feels like he's covered with a hard shell, on the inside as well as the outside.

_I'm fine._

The computer does help him learn. He takes an online name, though he avoids talking to others at length. He takes up programming immediately; if he has no outside world, he will create whatever worlds he can in the one thing he has available to him. He doesn't need the outside world; he can simply rely on himself and what is in front of him, and the internet provides him the ability to learn that. 

Four months since he got his computer, he gets a message:

_**2020:** Download this._

It comes with a link. 

_Why?_

_**2020:** It's a game. I thought that we could play together._

_Do you have time for games?_

_**2020:** I have time for my brother._

It stirs something in him, a cold and sickening feeling. It isn't resentment, but he isn't sure what it is. You have time for games, he thinks. You have something you want from this, he thinks.

He isn't sure what, but there it is: Theo must have something he wants from this, or he wouldn't have offered this. But he is bored and he has not done anything with anyone else for so long, so Theo also has something he wants. 

He downloads the game. They play.

Over the years, he learns many things on the computer. He learns _the computer_ as well, of course, how to program and adapt and change and develop, but not just that. It is just that it is the only practical place for him to put his knowledge. He reads how-to pages compulsively even though there is no way for him to put that knowledge into action. He can absorb information quicker and quicker as time goes past, perhaps because it is the only thing he is allowed to practice. At first, he would read the same instructional pages over and over until he could envision what it would be like to engage in those activities; later, he could give something a quick glance-over and more or less feel like he understood things as a whole. 

When he is twelve, he discovers pornography, because of course he does. He discovers that women don't do it for him, and that men do, but it's a useless discovery. There is nobody to share it with or hide it from -- he certainly will not tell his brother in their rare games together online or rarer conversations (Theo still messages, but Noiz only rarely answers). And it is not something he can put to much good. He tries masturbating, of course -- looks up advice and technique -- but it is more frustrating than helpful. He gets turned on by what he watches, but nothing he does feels good. His anger flares but there's no target any more, not like there were with other people. If he breaks his computer he has nothing. So he gives up, ignores it, and bites his tongue until it goes away.

When he turns fourteen, they free him. It is abrupt, if not exactly unexpected. At fourteen, he has criminal responsibility for his own actions. He wasn't sure if it would come then, or age of majority at eighteen, or never. Fourteen had been one possibility, but he had forgotten when his birthday was.

His parents have tight expressions, and his brother has another one; he recognizes it as a smile, but can't put it together with the look in his eyes to make any sense of it. He himself doesn't feel his face do anything. It doesn't reflect the triumph and repulsion inside him. It doesn't need to. He doesn't care. His parents congratulate him on how calm and refined he has become. Theo tries to take his hands, which Noiz steps away from.

"Don't touch me," Noiz says.

His parents congratulate him on his restraint. He checks that his bank account is open. It is.

So he leaves.

The world is big and strange and full of people who barely seem like people. They laugh and yell and wear all kinds of expressions in public and move like the surface of their skin means something to them. Noiz feels strange. Like he's wearing a suit instead of a body, a muffling meat suit he can barely control compared to everyone he sees. But he is free and it doesn't matter that his body is meaningless. He doesn't need to feel things. If he can observe the world with his own eyes, his own ears, he will be able to pick out what other people want and manipulate it. That's all he needs to survive.

Eventually, he goes to an island called Midorijima. He had been reading up on a form of computerized assistant, Allmates, being produced by a corporation located there, and came across a reference to a game. Rhyme. It is played with your minds, and even though it's all in your head, you feel pain like it's real.

He wants, so he goes. Maybe, if he can find pain there, he will be able to feel alive.

He wants to find something that will make him feel alive.

***

Theo stopped using '2020' when he began working to take over running the company, of course. Noiz discovers that quickly, and isn't surprised; a corporate heir didn't have time for video games or net play. But he hasn't become this talented with computers for nothing. He finds all of Theo's contact information and considers it for a while before he notices what he's doing and frowns at himself. 

_Theo,_  
I'm coming home. If you have areas of employment I could assist you with, I would be pleased to aid you. No hurry. I need to resolve things with our parents, of course.  


He gets the answer back quicker than he expected, within twenty minutes of sending.

_I didn't think you'd ever return._

Noiz considers how to answer. There's the short version, _me neither_ , and he is tempted by it. He is sorely tempted.

He sends:

_By all rights, I shouldn't. I don't think either of us think it was anything but child abuse out of misplaced pride. Even leaving me my bank account... I've thought about it a lot. I wondered if it was a way to keep me back there, keep me dependent. But I think it's probably guilt. They're normal human beings, after all, and even if they were horrified by the monster child who couldn't feel pain, they had empathy themselves. They denied it and ignored it to abuse me because they felt they had to, but by giving me the freedom of 'no financial restrictions' when I was no longer their responsibility, they could assuage their guilt. Something like that._

_However, I have met someone and fallen in love. I could get employment here; I have many skills that make good money. I could also continue to live off the guilt they offered up to me at the end to survive off of. Both options require making use of their legacy. But it is impossible to divorce myself from my past. I have thought about it a lot. I would like to support that person. I would like to examine what I could have become and develop those skills as well -- if there is room to work under you. You have become the heir and you are welcome to it. But I hope that I can increase my skills and aid the company in my own way._

_I would like you to meet him. Do not tell our parents that you know this. They are not entitled to more of my life than I choose to share with them. I think it's different with you. I didn't trust you, because I had no ability to trust. But the world isn't that awful a place. And sometimes we do things out of kindness. You were also a child, over your head in that place, but I think you offered me kindness. I don't know. I was never taught to recognize it. But I'll trust you now, out of kindness.  
\- Wilhelm_

This answer he waits considerably longer for. It's not surprising, but he feels strange anyway. He folds his fingers together and feels the pressure of his knuckles. It hurts and he bows his head over his hand, bites his lower lip, feels the sting, feels a burning in his eyelids as tears threaten to well up. How embarrassing. He'd thought he'd cried them all out years earlier.

His email chimes.

_There is so much I feel I should say in person. Where I can hear your voice, see you, touch you. Words by themselves aren't enough. But know this: I love you. Any place you wish to be in my life, I will open up to you. And I would love to see the man who has helped Wim be able to speak so honestly.  
\- Theo_

He scrubs the back of his hand over his cheeks. The piercings in the back of his hand rub; he can feel them grind against his cheekbone, and it drags a hoarse chuckle from his throat. 

"Crying? Noiz is crying?"

Gently, he pushes the hovering Pseudobunny away. "Stupid," he says. "I'm smiling. Can't you tell that much?"


End file.
